Litko Boom-Boom Burn-Burn Markers

This is what they look like with the light in front...

...and this is them with the light behind them.

The guys in that tank and that truck
could just be in a tiny spot of trouble.

Just arrived today, after a pointless diversion to the Netherlands (I suspect that USPS sent them off to old Zealand instead of New Zealand), are these laser-cut acrylic blast and burn markers from Litko.

I'd seen them in photographs on the Great and Glorious Internet (She At Whose Bountiful Teats We Daily Suckle) and I've wanted some for a while, but until recently I didn't actually know who made them. Now I do know, and now I have some of my own. There are four sets in total shown in these photos.

They come disassembled, and need to be glued together. Therein lies a trap for the unwary, for cyanoacrylate adhesives (superglue), the glue used almost universally by modellers these days, will fog acrylic sheet. Fortunately, I already knew this, having worked with acrylic sheet a lot when I was employed in the Display Department at Canterbury Museum, back in the '80s.

I whipped up some acrylic cement of my own by dissolving some acrylic fragments in acetone, making sure it stayed just liquid enough to run into the joints by capillary action, and cemented the little suckers together in a jiffy. You can use straight acetone, but by adding the dissolved acrylic it adds a degree of gap-filling capability, and more importantly, it slows the evaporation of the acetone, giving it more time to soften and cement the edges of the components, so you get a stronger weld.

They weren't especially cheap, but neither are they overly expensive, and I think they look pretty good on the table. They certainly look better than using a bunch of dice to indicate the extents of a barrage.